"David C. Ullrich" wrote:> Curious. Say you're living in a state that's overwhelmingly> for candidate XXX and you favor candidate A. Your vote has> essentially no effect under the current system - under a straight> popular vote it would have the same effect as everyone else's.

That is, essentially none.

> Maximizing voter's "power" is a good thing, but equating this> "power" with the probability that the vote will decide the> election is absurd.

Since at the end of the day I'm more or less an (individualist) anarchist,I'm not going to enter into a normative discussion of what constitutesa "good" voting system. But *descriptively* this idea of voterpower makes a lot of sense, and implies that almost everyone who hasn'tspecifically studied the issue has precisely the wrong notion aboutwho is favored by the electoral college system.

Most people who look at the issue superficially note that even theleast populous state gets three electors, and conclude (quite wrongly)that the system gives disproportionate power to the small statesbecause their ratio of electoral votes to population is higher.

In fact, it's easy to see that other things being equal (the "otherthings" are e.g. the closeness of the race in your state and theproportion of undecideds), your chance of deciding the electionis proportional to 1/sqrt(n) where n is the number of voters.Since the number of electoral votes is (roughly) proportional to n,it follows that your power is approximately proportional to sqrt(n).That is, the system gives disproportionate power to voters in *large*states.

Now you might well ask what practical difference this makes, giventhat (all the propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding) neverhas a state really been decided by a one-vote margin.

Well, the reason it makes a difference is that the same argumentshold for, say, a block of 100,000 votes. So lets say I know I'msoon going to be running for president, and I'm in charge ofa committee that's assigning a pork-barrel project that I expectto be worth 100,000 votes in the state in which I place it, andmy choices are California and Wyoming. If my main concern ismy presidential ambitions, I'd be nuts to put it in Wyoming.

Now all this is basically a consequence of the winner-take-allrule that most states have adopted. If electors were to beassigned proportionally to the vote in each state, thenthe two votes each state gets corresponding to its senatorswould indeed mean that the small states would have disproportionatepower.